Published on 28 April 2005
26 November 2008 - Wall Street Journal Asia unjustly found in contempt of court and fined
18 September 2008 - Blogger Gopalan Nair gets three months in prison for insulting judge
17 June 2008 - US blogger Gopalan Nair still waiting the outcome of trial
Reporters Without Borders today expressed support for a student from Singapore forced to shut down his blog on 26 April for fear of a libel action by the head of a government body and warned that "such intimidation could make the country’s blogs as timid and obedient as the traditional media."
"Threatening a libel suit is an effective way to silence criticism and this case highlights the lack of free expression in Singapore, which is among the 20 lowest-scoring countries in our worldwide press freedom index," it said. "We especially support bloggers because they often exercise a freedom not seen in the rest of a country’s media.
The threat of prosecution came from Philip Yeo, chairman of the government’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), which grants research scholarships, who claimed it was libelled in a blog by Jiahao Chen, a Singapore citizen currently studying in the United States. Writing under the pseudonym of Acid Flask, he criticised several government policies, including the A*STAR scholarship system and Yeo’s justifications of them. He also agreed to his remarks being reproduced in the Electric New Paper. Yeo sent him several e-mails demanding that he delete all blogs mentioning him or A*STAR and threatening legal action if he did not.
A few days later, Acid Flask shut down the blog and posted a message of apology to Yeo in its place. Other Singapore blogs that had reproduced the remarks quickly afterwards posted apologies or themselves closed down.
Scores of Chinese journalists, bloggers and human rights activists were arrested, put under house arrested or expelled from Beijing before and during the Olympic Games. The Games have now finished and we call for their release !
